[rescue] CD ROM Server

[Erie Patsellis]

Phil,
the only reason I kept these is that they take standard AT motherboards, 
and have a couple of huge power supplies in them, as well as 28 1/2 
height drive bays. With very little work, would make a hell of a file 
server case.
but having downgraded from home/business owner to employed tenant over 
the last few years, just trying to get my expenses down (2 storage units 
add up)

erie

Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Erie Patsellis wrote:
>   
>> As I go through my cave of treasure, I keep finding perfectly good stuff 
>> that doesn't make sense for me to hold onto any longer, so expect more 
>> listings as I come across stuff.
>>
>> I have a 2 cabinet 56 CD ROM SCSI based server, from what I remember, it 
>> has a EISA 486 based motherboard, booted from a floppy and loaded a 
>> flavor of Novell, has 4 EISA SCSI cards, all drives present and are tray 
>> loading. I will get some pics, but I need to get this gone and hate to 
>> see it just become landfill fodder. Anybody close(ish) (within driving 
>> distance) to Central IL interested?
>>     
>
> Ah, EISA.
>
> I remember trying to write an EISA configuration file once for a Media
> Vision ProAudio Spectrum/16 sound card.  Oy gevalt.  The ECU's
> custom-configuration tool didn't have enough configuration lines to
> allocate all the ports and I/O addresses it used.
>
> I remember buying an "upgradeable" ALR EISA 386 desktop PC.  Then going
> to upgrade it about a year later to a 486 and finding that the cost of
> the new 486 CPU daughtercard to upgrade it was $200 less than buying a
> brand new ALR EISA 486 tower machine, and didn't include L2 cache.  Bait
> and switch... yeah, technically you COULD upgrade it, but it made zero
> technical or financial sense to do so.
>
> So I found a monstrous super-tower case from Fry's, and a local
> manufacturer's 486 EISA motherboard with far more capabilities than the
> ALR one, talked another local company into selling me an engineering
> prototype caching IDE controller that was blindingly fast and had
> limited RAID capabilities (it could combine physical disks into a single
> logical device, but it was a span, not a stripe), and built a machine I
> was still using five years later for less than the price of the ALR
> upgrade card.  Then I traded the ALR for ...  something.  I don't remember.